For the initial colouring, I used a specific brush that paints transparent as well as covering, which also creates new shades of colour. This was followed by the most tedious part of the process, protracting the different levels of colour layer by layer. To accentuate parts, I used related shades of colour during this process. Eventually, it looked like the next illustration and I think you can already make out how it will finally look like. I also started working on the background to visualise the exposure of light more clearly.

I have often heard that the smudge-brush is frowned upon by many artists. However, I like to use it, because if you operate it pointedly you attain very realistic effects. For blurring, I used two different brushes and reduced their opacity to 70%. After that, I returned to the first brush and protracted another level of colour. I repeated this steps several times until it nearly pleased me. In between I also blended several layers to obtain better contrasts. That might sound like a thing of five minutes, actually it took me about 40 hours alone to finish the dress, so don ' t get me wrong.

In the next illustration you can see how a better contrast is achieved by blending colours. The first one still looks a little toneless; that ' s why I blended a light shade of skin colour to jazz it up a little.

For now, I had finished with dress and peacock and could come back to the face. I really like drawing faces and it can happen that I get bored with a picture as soon as I finish the face. Therefore I work evenly-keeled on every aspect so that the overall impression is correct and stays interesting.

For Violet's skin I chose a diluted colour of skin, a porcelainesque complexion that gives her a doll-like look, wouldn't it be for her crimson lips. The eye mask was previously painted in a larger resolution (the original image size is 3079x5786 pixel with 300 DPI) and inserted later. Otherwise it would have been impossible to work out the filigree details. I used four different brushes for the face, including the one I used for blurring and an extremely soft one.

What was still missing where the little details that should put the finishing touches to the picture. That includes an enormous number of brushes, blurriness and blending of layers. I often used the applications " Overlay " and " Hard Light " to attain as bright effects as possible as you can see in the next illustration. Furthermore, I used a photo brush I created from a photo for the adornments of the top. The left illustration already looks quite beautiful, but the brushes give more transparency to it, don ' t you think?

To give the picture a more realistic aspect, I used a soft focus filter followed by the Gaussian Blur. You have to experiment a little with the colours until it looks finished.